The U.S. authorities discovered no direct connection between the president and prison teams, the Occasions reported. It by no means opened a proper probe. “There isn’t any investigation into President López Obrador,” the Justice Division stated in an announcement.
López Obrador responded Thursday that the costs have been false and unsupported by any documentation.
The report got here at a fragile second. López Obrador has been a vital companion to the Biden administration because it tries to sluggish irregular migration. U.S. officers are additionally urging Mexico to crack down on the manufacturing of lethal fentanyl.
However earlier this month, the Mexican chief almost canceled a high-level assembly on fentanyl and migration after different information reviews raised questions on alleged drug cash in his first presidential marketing campaign in 2006. López Obrador denied these allegations. The Feb. 6 assembly went forward after President Biden known as his Mexican counterpart.
The controversy hasn’t, nevertheless, died down. The reviews in regards to the unsuccessful 2006 marketing campaign spawned a hashtag #narcopresidente — narco president — which exploded on social media. López Obrador’s opponents have seized on the drug allegations as they attempt to dislodge his celebration from workplace in nationwide elections on June 2. The president’s protégé, former Mexico Metropolis Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, has a large lead in polls.
López Obrador stated Thursday that he meant to keep up good relations with Washington — however U.S. businesses wouldn’t be allowed to research Mexican officers.
“There may be cooperation, there needs to be,” López Obrador instructed his every day information convention. “However we gained’t settle for subordination, or interventionism.”
The Mexican chief has had frosty relations with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration since he took workplace in 2018. López Obrador declared the U.S.-backed drug battle a failure and introduced a coverage generally known as “hugs, not bullets” — counting on social packages to maintain folks from becoming a member of drug gangs.
Cooperation with the DEA almost collapsed after the company secretly investigated a former Mexican protection minister, Salvador Cienfuegos, on drug expenses, resulting in his 2020 arrest in Los Angeles. The Trump administration freed him amid an outcry by Mexico’s authorities. But the DEA’s capability to function was severely curbed, simply as Mexico was rising because the No. 1 supply of fentanyl to the USA.
The Occasions cited two accounts of alleged contacts between López Obrador’s aides and drug traffickers. In a single, an informant described a gathering with Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada García, a frontrunner of the Sinaloa cartel, earlier than López Obrador gained the 2018 election. Within the second, one other informant stated {that a} founding father of the Zetas cartel gave $4 million to 2 of his allies in an effort to win launch from jail.
The report didn’t establish the president’s aides allegedly concerned in both case. It’s not clear whether or not the reviews have been ever independently confirmed, the Occasions reported.
In a 3rd case, the Occasions reported, a supply instructed U.S. brokers that trafficking teams had movies of the president’s sons receiving drug cash.
The American ambassador to Mexico from 2019-2021, Christopher Landau, instructed The Washington Submit that he was by no means knowledgeable of any such allegations. “It raises questions on how critically this was taken, or what stage of confidence” the DEA had within the data, he stated.
A former senior DEA official, talking on the situation of anonymity to guard his present personal sector job, stated he was conscious of informants’ accounts of drug cash flowing into López Obrador’s campaigns. However to construct a case, brokers would wish authorization from a high-level committee that will weigh potential implications for U.S. international coverage. That permission wasn’t sought, he stated.
“We already knew what the reply was going to be,” he stated.
For many years, drug-trafficking teams have penetrated the Mexican authorities. A yr in the past, one of many U.S. authorities’s closest companions within the drug struggle, Genaro García Luna, who was public-security minister from 2006-2012, was discovered responsible in U.S. federal court docket of accepting bribes from the Sinaloa cartel.
Critics have typically questioned whether or not López Obrador adopted his “hugs not bullets” strategy as a result of he’d lower a take care of drug teams. But Falko Ernst, a senior Mexico analyst for the Worldwide Disaster Group, stated that the president’s insurance policies truly weren’t that totally different from these of his predecessor. López Obrador, for instance, captured Ovidio Guzmán, a son of famed druglord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, and extradited him to the USA to face drug-trafficking expenses.
“This administration has been pushing a story that’s typically fairly starkly disconnected with realities on the bottom,” he stated.
López Obrador regularly tries to discredit journalists who write critically about him, and Thursday’s information convention was no totally different. In ridiculing Occasions correspondent Natalie Kitroeff’s efforts to get touch upon the drug story, the president revealed her telephone quantity.
Jan-Albert Hootsen, Mexico consultant of the Committee to Shield Journalists, stated the transfer was unethical in a rustic with excessive charges of violence in opposition to reporters. “The Mexican press and international press right here have already got greater than sufficient safety considerations,” he stated.
Devlin Barrett in Washington and Lorena Rios in Monterrey, Mexico, contributed to this report.